


Black is the Colour of My True Love's Hair – Frerard

by goodguymitch



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-29 22:10:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11450076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodguymitch/pseuds/goodguymitch
Summary: In metastasis, cancer cells break away from where they first formed, travel through the blood or lymph system, and form new tumors in other parts of the body. The metastatic tumor is the same type of cancer as the primary tumor. That is exactly was the case for seventeen year old Frank Iero.But what  happens when he meets Gerard Way, who also suffers with cancer?





	Black is the Colour of My True Love's Hair – Frerard

But Black is the colour of my true love's hair.   
His face is like some rosy fair,   
The prettiest face and the neatest hands,   
I love the ground whereon he stands.

I love my love and well he knows,   
I love the ground whereon he goes,   
If you no more on earth I see,   
I can't serve you as you have me.

The winter's passed and the leaves are green,   
The time is passed that we have seen,   
But still I hope the time will come   
When you and I shall be as one.

I go to the Clyde for to mourn and weep,  
But satisfied I never could sleep.   
I'll write to you a few short lines,   
I'll suffer death ten thousand times.

So fare you well, my own true love   
The time has passed, but I wish you well.   
But still I hope the time will come   
When you and I will be as one.

I love my love and well he knows,   
I love the ground whereon he goes.   
The prettiest face, the neatest hands,   
I love the ground whereon he stands.

I finished the poem after several days of writing. I had no idea how to express these emotions. It feels almost impossible to put it together in words let alone pouring my heart out in a poem. I'm not sure if I can physically move. I have no desire to do anything I just want to stay here with the blinds closed and go back to sleep. Often I do go back to sleep and miss on everything I plan to do. I felt my lip quiver and my eyes getting heavy. I begin to cry. This is a cry like no other. It could deep heart stabbing cry. It hurts more than anything. And I'm glad he died. He's happier now, no more pain. Suffering. 

He's okay now.

Everything was quiet until I started to feel different. I was sweating furiously and my vision became blurry. Anxiety rushed through my body like a tsunami, not knowing what the fuck is going on. Suddenly, I felt an uncomfortable pressure in my chest. Pain in my shoulders, neck and arms escalated from mild to intense. It feels like pressure, tightness, burning everywhere. My breath quickened and I felt like I was suddenly experiencing some sort of relapse.

I then black out and never opened my eyes again.

—

Years before... 

Several years before. 

And there he was, smiling like an angel; only two rows of pearly whites and a dimple that punctured both of his rosy pink cheeks. He laughed his hardest at the smallest remarks being made by the director of the support group, who didn't have the best jokes; nor the eligibility to crack me up. But all in all, it seemed he was amused by anyone/everyone who started a 'joke' about dogs and unicorns. It wasn't a bad thing, of course. Having a good sense of humor is an excellent way to stay alive, and it'll save you from further depression. 

In my case, I wasn't happy, nor will I ever be. Life isn't always going to be happy-go-lucky when you have stage 3 Hodgkin's lymphoma. The only thing that's ever on your mind is the cancer itself and death. Happiness never really roams your mind as you are receiving several different types of treatments. Burning hot radiation, vein aching chemotherapy, and the pills. There are no words to describe the pills. If they get lodged in your throat, you are one lucky goose. Your chances of dying are high now that you are deprived from the oxygen keeping you alive. 

Asphyxiation by pills, perhaps. 

But overall the suicidal thoughts and the painful IV injections, the rest of the world wants to keep you breathing. Doctors and nurses act like they care for you so much when it is their job to save you. They get to watch you suffer and subsequently they get a large amount of compensation to only do nothing but watch you ache in despair.

But I have lived my days in believing in something so very distant. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope to show? Was I content with myself and what I had done with my life so far? I decided that I was essentially a good person, although I could have been better.

But at the same time I understood that the cancer didn't care.

I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, I wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organized religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking, and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my only friend-Ray, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the end of the day, if there was indeed somebody or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized. 

If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, 'But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven.' If so, I was going to reply, 'You know what? You're right. Fine.' I believed, too, in the doctors and the medicine and the surgeries. I believed in that. I believed in them. A person like Dr. Jennings–my oncologist that let me call him Jim–that's someone to believe in, I thought, a person with the mind to develop an experimental treatment 20 years ago that now could save my life. I believed in the hard currency of his intelligence and his research.

Beyond that, I had no idea where to draw the line between spiritual belief and science. But I knew this much: I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe--what other choice was there? We do it every day, I realized. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. 

To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery.

To continue believing in yourself, believing in the doctors, believing in the treatment, believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing, I decided. It had to be.

Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you. I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennium doomsday. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit.

So, I believed.

"You're next," The director pointed to the boy I've been staring at for a while and he stood up immediately. 

"My name is Frank Iero and I have stage 3 metastatic cancer. It from my lungs to my brain to my thyroid and it spread to my bloodstream. But I will be happy to inform all of you I experiencing remission for the first time in my life," He grinned, everyone else seemed to be confused on how and why he was smiling. Mentioning cancer should never be satisfying to anybody. Maybe he's just different and found a sense of contentment within himself. Maybe it's because he is slightly cured.

No wonder why he has a full head of hair.

"Splendid! And how have you manage to cope with such an awful type and stage of this disease that will probably never go away?" The director asked and Frank thought for a second. His eyebrows furrowed he looked down.

"After several hours undergoing chemotherapy, I have discovered the beauties of poetry. I wrote a poem every single day as I was expecting death or something much worse– complications of my disease. That's why I make the best of everything and try to live each day as if it will be my last," He explained thoroughly, scratching the back of his neck with his tattooed hands. He looked at me in a way I couldn't explain. It's the kind of expression you have when you glimpse at something so beautiful; something you couldn't really live without. His face was almost literally in awe, his eyes are practically glued to myself.

I am not at all any of those things...

After the session was over, I waited in the front of the building for my mom to give me a lift. My moment of silence and loneliness was interrupted when Frank approached me with a smile glue to his face, a copper cane in his hand. This was yet another different type of cheeky grin.

Perhaps 'smile' or 'grin' wasn't the right words for it – the top row of teeth was showing, and there was a faint curve to the lips, but there was no crease below the eyes, no movement of the cheeks. On anyone else, it would be a grimace, at best. 

On this face, however, it was a sign of bliss.


End file.
